Bland, bland, bland. "The Wedding Singer" is not the worst show to ever travel through the Saroyan as part of the Best of Broadway series, but it certainly didn't show much sparkle. I saw the Wednesday night performance and was mostly unimpressed with the acting, music and storyline. (The singing and staging were more than adequate, and the dancing had a few stellar moments.) This adaptation of the popular Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore movie crammed in as many '80s references as it could, but it lacked the film's quirky, offbeat charm. The main characters, Robbie Hart (J. Michael Zygo) and Julia Sullivan (Jillian Zygo), who are husband and wife in real life, had some moments of sweetness, but there was little comic chemistry.

There's only one character who breaks through: that of Linda (Jennifer Gottlieb), the over-the-top fiancee who dumps the wedding-singer main character, Robbie. Stomping out in a Madonna-bustier-inspired wedding dress get-up, she delivers her "A Note From Linda" with a husky, grunting, full-of-herself, vocal-onslaught acerbity-- all the while offering satirical shades of the Material Girl. Later in the (admittedly better) second act, Linda shows up again, this time to steal the show once again with her over-the-top, acrobatic sexuality. If the creative team had figured out a way to extend Linda's appeal to the rest of the show, this could have been a raucous trip back to an earlier decade. Instead, it just sort of fades into the dustbin of Broadway history.